Austin Whittall

The ultimate guide to Patagonia's cryptids, mythical beasts and legendary creatures.
From lake monsters to giants, from dwarves to surviving prehistoric beasts: a Patagonian bestiary.
If you find any useful information, or just like my blog, a link back would be great!

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

In 1767, Captain Samuel Wallis took the HMS “Dolphin” back to Patagonia and actually measured the tallest natives with a rod. He proved that they were tall but not giants: “one of these was six feet seven inches high [2.01 m], several more were six feet five, and six feet six inches high [1,96 to 1,98 m]; but the stature of the greater part of them was from five feet ten to six feet [1,78 to 1,83 m]”.[1]

He also the first to point out that their feet were “remarkably small”;[1] putting in doubt the myth about big footed Patagons.

That same year French Explorer Louis de Bougainville commented on their “good height” and strong but not gigantic build.[2]

Spanish Admiral Alonso de Cordova measured them accurately in 1785/6, and found that the tallest did not exceed 2 m (6 ft. 7 in.) and that their average height was between 1,83 and 1,97 m (6 – 6 ft. 6 in.).[3]

Jesuit Father Falkner also wrote about a Tehuelche chief, by the name of Cangapol, who was “seven feet and some inches tall” [over 2.10 m], yet he noted that he “never heard about that nation of giants mentioned by others” despite having seen members of all the southern tribes;[4] except the tall and stout Buta-Guillín who may have been the “real” giants.

It appears that during the closing years of the eighteenth century, Illuminism and modern science marked a change: the giants suddenly disappeared from Patagonia and were replaced by very tall men –humans not giants.

In 1780, Spanish official, Antonio de Viedma, who explored the Patagonian coast, reported their height was between two varas and nine palms, that is 1,63 to 1,89 m (5.3 to 6.2 ft.). He believed that their build “thick in proportion to their height” and the fact that they wore bulky guanaco furs as clothes, may have fueled the stories that depicted them as giants.[5]

In 1826, English Captain Phillip Parker King noted that the natives’ height was “between five feet ten and six feet [1.78 – 1.83 m]”.[6]

Captain FitzRoy, who was accompanied to Patagonia by Charles Darwin (of evolutionary fame), wrote in 1833 that they were “a tall and extremely stout race of men” of which very few measured less than “five feet nine or ten” [1,75 -1,78 m].[7] Once again tall but not gigantic.

Alcide D’Orbigny, a French naturalist also measured them at the Rio Negro River in 1828 found them shorter: 1,73 cm [5 ft. 8 in.].[8]

George Musters, an Englishman who travelled with them for over a year in 1870 estimated the mean height of the Aonikenk Tehuelche in his group as “five feet and ten inches [1,78 m]”.[10] He also gave an explanation for their “big” feet myth:

hide overshoes are worn [besides their horse skin boots] and the footprints thus made are really large enough to convey the idea of giant’s feet, and partly explain the term ‘Patagón’, or large feet.[10]

He also noted that their “feet […] were frequently smaller than mine”. This definitively debunked the “big feet” myth.

English sailor giving a giant Patagon woman a biscuit for her child.From: [11]. Anon. Front Plate.

Was there a tribe of giants?

So, we have seen that there is conflicting evidence. Some explorers saw men of gigantic proportions; others saw tall and well built men, but not giants. What can we make out out of this?

There is no doubt that the Tehuelche people are of a great height, comparable to that of the Sudanese Dinka, the Dutch and Croatians, who nowadays are the tallest people on Earth.

To XVIth century Europeans, the tall Tehuelche must have appeared enormous. At that time, the average height of northern Europeans was barely 1,67 m (5 ft. 6 in.) and southern Europeans were even shorter (1.5 m or 5 ft.). When face to face with men over 30 cm (1 ft.) taller than them, they must have been very impressed and indubitably would have called them giants.

Unfortunately, the Tehuelche as a race disappeared in the late XIXth century; the proud, strongly built and tall natives of the Patagonian steppes are now only a memory. But, as reported by Van Noort, Frezier and Byron, the Tehuelche were not alone; there was another group, gigantic and warlike, the Tiremenen.

Could they have been the bearded bellicose Caucauhue seen by De Rueda and not reported by any other explorer since 1641?

Though contrary to contemporary mainstream anthropologists’ views who do not record any tribe of gigantic stature in the region, we believe that there may be some truth underlying van Noort’s Tiremenen.

It may be possible that they were a tribe of slowly vanishing giant men; a group of “foot-Indians” unable to compete with the horse riding Tehuelche. They were probably weakened by illnesses borne by the first European explorers, against which they had no defenses (small-pox, measles or even the common cold). Both factors –illness and war- forced them to retreat away from the coast where they had first been seen by the Europeans, into the Andes, their last bastion against their fierce Tehuelche enemies.

They somehow managed to survive until the late 1700s when they were last seen, and after bloody battles with the Southern Tehuelche groups (Aonikenk), they quite suddenly disappeared.

We find corroboration of this hypothesis in the reports of the XIXth century Patagonian explorers:

Ned Chace, an American who lived in Patagonia between 1898 and 1929 had heard from contemporary natives of “Indians in Patagonia different from the Tehuelches, bigger than they, and hostile to them”.[49] Unlike the Tehuelche who used boleadoras (for information on these stone weapons, see our post on Tachwüll), they used the same stone tipped arrows and “bola perdida” that the Paleo-Indians –and Pigafetta’s Patagons- had employed. This clearly indicates their pedestrian way of life (bow and arrows are difficult to use while riding a horse).

He also had heard of the killing of the last of these giant Indians, which had been “caught by the Tehuelches in a cave near Gallegos and smoked to death there”.[12]

Chace was sure that they were giants because he had dug up some old graves and in one found a very large leg bone that when rested on the ground “came two inches [5 cm] above his knee. Chace was 5 ft. 11 in. tall [1,80 m]” so the bones were indeed large.[12]

There are however true and reliable reports on ancient stories of terrible battles fought in Southern Santa Cruz, where tribe decimated tribe; these may reflect the dying throes of the giant Tiremenen.

Italian explorer Giacomo Bove in 1881 wrote that a local “gaucho” (Argentine cowboy) named García told him that while driving cows through southern Santa Cruz, he came across “a valley full of bones”; they were gigantic, and human, belonging to “an extinguished race […] a nation of men with colossal skeletons”.[13]

Argentine explorer Ramón Lista heard similar tales from the Aonikenk and wrote about some caves along the middle course of the Gallegos River, which he believed “may be the homes of a race defeated by the Tehuelche”.[14]

Carlos M. Moyano, an officer of the Argentine navy had already explored these caves in 1886, reporting that the ground was strewn with their bones, his native guide told him that it was a place where, “many Indians of ‘yore’ had fought”. [15]

Coinciding with Chace’s comments, Moyano noted that one of the caves was known as the “grotto of the asphyxiated”.

The succinct evidence mentioned above hints that, after all, there could be some truth in the myth of the Patagonian giants, the Tiremenen, proud members of a bellicose tribe that quietly vanished from the face of the Earth after being vanquished by their fellow Tehuelche. Their bones turning to dust by the Gallegos River.My humble homage to them is this “unofficial stamp”:

4 comments:

Hey, just found out this morning about what the word Patagonia originally meant, and I had to google it. Found your blog and read it through with great interest. This is a fascinating subject! I am wondering why today's archeologists have not found evidences from old graves... what a great discovery it would be... or maybe it's all exagerated...? Anyway, great article, thank you so much for sharing.Cheers O

Fantastic information!I think the giants were real. They were the Tiremenen, and the sailors, and captains of the royal fleets of Spain, France, England and Dutch were all reporting what they honestly saw with their own eyes. They could not all have been lying for 200 years!

The skeletons of giant Indians have also been documented in North America, and many of the Spanish explorers reported giant sized Indians, 7, 8 and 9 feet tall. Even today occasionally bones of tall people are still found in the burial mounds. The bones of a Neolithic giant were found in France in 1890 and studied and reported in the New York Times, the scientific estimate was 3,50 meters tall. See: Le geant fossile de Castelnau. Other odd sized bones and huge skeletons have been reported in dolmens in Spain and the Mediterranean, either as abnormality or perhaps a tribe of giant size. These sorts of finds don't seem to be important to science anymore, because we don't hear about them in the news like they were 100 years ago.

I think like the mammoth, and the dinosaurs, the giant people of the past have all become extinct, and the knowledge of their existence is also becoming extinct.

There were never giants 20 feet tall, I do not believe. But humans 7 to 9, or perhaps even 10 or 11 feet MIGHT be possible. I think some evidence could be found to prove this if science became interested in the subject again. Infact, I have a list of museums which may have such bones.

I think they were real. There is a corroborating website, www.stevequayle.com and a related site www.genesis6giants.com which has much information about giants around the world, not only in antiquity but also today. It appears that there may be some kind of coordinated effort to hide a part of the past that may not coincide with current pc thought. One other site that would corroborate this is www.s8int.com ... has a lot of interesting information and includes about Giants.

Look, if there were giant animals like dinosaurs, so there were giant humans.Something made them grow to reach colossal proportions. And of course, they were comtemporaries. I do not believe the dinosaurs were exterminated by a meteorite 60 millions years ago.These archeologists and anthropologists always talking like Carl Sagan:millions and millions of years ago. How stupid and simplist.Giantism in the flora and fauna could have been caused by the strong gravitation OF TWO MOONS, one of which later was desrtroyed or fell on the Pacific Ocean.And that, was no long ago.The last of the dinosaurs were seen by the chinese and the cambodians just about 1500 yeras ago, as written on some ancient texts., that were later confused with dragons.

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